Typically I have many, many projects listed in the Eclipse Project Explorer, usually more than 100 projects: from example projects, projects on git, lecture module projects, research projects or just some hobby projects I’m working on. With the default Eclipse settings, all these projects are listed in a ‘linear’ list. What I found really useful is the ability to group them into ‘Working Sets‘:

Grouped Projects in Eclipse Project Explorer

Eclipse ‘Working Sets’ are sets of projects I can group together.

First, you need to define your working set, see https://mcuoneclipse.com/2012/05/17/eclipse-working-sets-explained/ and https://mcuoneclipse.com/2020/07/24/eclipse-gems-tips-tricks-working-sets/

With working sets, I can display or hide groups or set of groups of projects. But how to group them together in a kind of ‘virtual folders’ in a hierarchical view as shown below?

Hierarchical Working Set View

First, select the working sets you want to show:

Select Working Set Menu

Next, select the ones to be in the working set. Make sure to have the option ‘Selected Working Sets’ enabled:

List of selected working sets

Press OK.

Next, select the toolbar menu and enable Top Level Elements > Working Sets:

Top Level Elements with Working Sets

Now the projects are grouped and displayed as Working Sets with ‘Folders’ I can expand, browse, etc. Still all my other projects are available in a group on the bottom of the view. That way I can easily have all my projects organized and can work efficiently even having tons of projects in the workspace. The same way I can switch projects from one lecture module to another very quickly.

Happy Working 🙂

Links

• Introduction to Working Sets: https://mcuoneclipse.com/2012/05/17/eclipse-working-sets-explained/
• Working Sets with MCUXpresso IDE: https://mcuoneclipse.com/2020/07/24/eclipse-gems-tips-tricks-working-sets/